The Illusion of Free Will

Some say our sense that life means something is an illusion, or that it would be an illusion if there were no god. Some say free-will is an illusion. These claims confuse me.

The water I seem to see on the hot horizon is an illusion. The bend in the stick in the water in the pond is an illusion. These claims have sense because I know what it is to see water, am acquainted with the sight of a straight stick. But how does free-will really feel? What is it like for life really to mean something? These questions smack of nonsense. What is the genuine article against which to compare the alleged counterfeit?

"That four-sided triangle you saw was an illusion." Does that make sense? No. A four-sided triangle is impossible. There is nothing it is like to see one. There is nothing it is like to seem to see one. The can be no counterfeit of an impossible original. (But what is this an illusion of? Is there really an illusion?)

"That free will you thought you felt, that was an illusion." What? How would you know? Maybe you have a theory that says every event is necessitated by the laws of nature and the prior history of the universe. In such a world, can there be something it is like to experience the absence of necessitation?

There are at least two issues here. One, under what conditions could we meaningfully call something an illusion. Second, does free will fit those conditions.

Will suggests that we would need the familiarity with the genuine experience to meaningful suggest that something seemed to be it, but was in fact an illusion. However, I don’t think that’s quite right.

Suppose that Will came to me announced that last night he had seen the Ghost of Christmas Past. First, it would make sense for someone to argue that this must have been an illusion since ghosts do not exist.

Moreover, if I then showed him a system of mirrors that I had used to create an image of a translucent person, Will could sensibly say, “Oh now I see it was only an illusion.”

This is because despite never have seen a ghost and it arguably being impossible to see a ghost we nonetheless have a consistent notion of what it would mean to see a ghost. If we have an experience that we believe to be consistent with that notion but then is latter shown to be inconsistent with that notion then we can say the previous experience was illusory.

Now, in the case of free will I think we do have a consistent conception of what this means and moreover we can show that there are experiences which are inconsistent with the notion.

There are a number of these but the most convincing to me go as follows.

First, we set up a video camera. Then we open Will’s skull. Then we sever the corpus callosum. We then place a divider between Will’s right and left eyes. We then post a message seen only by the left eye that says “Touch Your Nose”

Will will likely touch his nose.

Then we ask Will. Why did you touch your nose. He might say something like – I just wanted to make sure you hadn’t paralyzed me yet.

We say thank you very much. We sew Will back up and then we play the recoding for him.

Will then sees that while he believed the touching of his nose to be contingent on a process he was consciously aware of, this was not the case. Specifically, it seemed as if the act of touching his nose was contingent upon his wondering whether we had paralyzed him. Indeed, the act of touching his nose was not contingent on that act of wonder.

Because of this we can meaningfully say that Will experienced the illusion of free will.

21 comments

My difficulty wIth saying free will is illusory is that I don’t think free will is a sensible enough concept that there are meaningful statements about it. No one can give me an account of what free will would be.

Unlike with the Ghost of Christmas Past imagine Will said, “I saw a fnord.” I can’t say that’s illusory or not until at minimum someone can explain what a fnord is.

There’s a British philosopher I had to read about in my History of Ethics class as an undergraduate. He defined free will using the following thought experiment (my apologies if I’ve misrepresented it here, but I don’t remember his name and this was a while ago…):

Suppose I held out two eggs in front of you and asked you to choose one. If one were a regular egg and one were made of solid gold, you would choose the one made of gold, because you have an uncontrollable preference for solid gold over eggs — the physiology of your mind *forces* you to choose the solid gold egg. So it’s not really a free choice at all.

But now suppose that each egg is *exactly* identical to the other — let’s say they’re both gold — and you have no good reason whatsoever to choose one over the other. But I ask you to choose one anyway. And you do. Let’s say you pick the left one.

Because you had no preference — there was nothing about your mind that forced you to prefer one to the other — your preference for each egg was perfectly balanced against the other, and because you picked one anyway, and because everything (including decisions) must have some *cause*, *something* must have caused you to choose the egg you did.

This philosopher would call that something “free will.” It was independent of the body, and even your (physiological) mind, and yet you yourself made the call. In your soul, so to speak, where religious men commonly believe the soul and the will reside.

I don’t think this is exactly an airtight definition of free will — maybe if your mind were really, truly, *perfectly* physiologically balanced, so that you *really* had no preference whatsoever, it would be impossible for you to choose one of my identical eggs, because all that matters is physics (as Thomas Hobbes said, albeit more eloquently and with more nuance), and so this thought experiment isn’t even plausible.

But I give it to you here just so you have one guy’s coherent-ish definition of free will.

I think the example of the fnord is a little off the mark. That’s more of a linguistic proposition than an epidemiological one. You may not know what a fnord is, but will is in a perfect position to test the reliability of what he saw.

Likewise, a child may not know (or be able to evaluate) the illusory character of the number 2, but I sure am.

What I’m trying to get at is that you can’t figure out whether free will exists or not, until you know what you mean by “free will.”

Are our actions determined by the state of our complete physiology? Sure. Is there any quantum induced randomness in this as a regular thing? It’s less certain, but probably not.

Of course if you have an account of free will that the severed corpus callosum seems to discredit, remember that it doesn’t necessarily hold for uninjured brains. If you cut my optic nerves, I will go blind, but that doesn’t mean that I cant see now.

It may be useful to distinguish between circumstances when we think we see something that doesn’t exist and when we don’t see something that actually does exist.

If we define free will as the absence of some external driving force that determines our actions, then to have an illusion of free will would be to think that no such external force exists when it really does.

But this doesn’t seem to be what we usually mean when we talk about illusions. If someone sneaks up on me from behind and picks my pocket, would it make sense to say that I experienced the illusion that no one was behind me?

Your thought experiment does not prove what you wish it to. (I am assuming you *do* wish it to prove something, i.e., that you will it be so.) Just because I am mistaken about why I did something does not mean I did not do it of my own volition.

Karl’s thought experiment reminds me of a friend of the family years ago recording herself sleepwalking at night, or at least recording the part where she left the bed and wandered off to god knows where. Kind of creepy when you realize she obviously came back and put herself into bed because that’s where she woke up. But where did she go?…

Anyway, even though she could recall part of her experience, I couldn’t imagine her thinking it was all done of her own volition.

Karl I think your physiological example of the illusion of free will is head-splitting. And not in a good way! It’s very difficult to follow.

I think that Will Wilkinson is right on the mark when it comes to explaining the qualia of free will. Given that free will and non-free will would feel the same, there is not logical way to distinguish the two from one another.

The fatal flaw in your example is this: how do we know that you haven’t just replaced one mechanism of unfree will with another, more direct, one that feels the same? You posit a state of affairs that rests on free will being the norm.

I think Will does confuse the issue when he considers the issue of impossibility though. Really the core of his argument is the inability true experiences from false ones when they feel the same.

Well assuming that your thought experiment wasn’t a thought experiment but an actual one, it wouldn’t have shown that the class of free-will instances is empty, but just that the event registered in that experiment didn’t belong to that class.
And in a way it could have been reversed in order to corroborate that free will cannot be experienced by a brain working with a severed corpus callosus.

In the book “Geeks” by Jon Katz, Jesse recounts a conversation with a humanities prof at the U of Chicago re: free will. “We argued about whether or not there exists a faculty of reason unique to man. …I argued that no, there is no such thing as reason, just chemistry and electricity… the mind is just a mass of chemicals and electricity. There’s nothing magic about it.”

If I give you a logic problem (or a math problem), the answer isn’t “do chemistry.” There is something about these nonphysical elements that has independent significance from things in the material world.

Karl, the split brain experiments are fascinating, but the issue is worth slowing down a bit.

In what sense is the split-brain patient’s action unfree? It is goal directed, and presumably motivated by a desire. If there were no desire to, e.g., please the experimenter, Will’s hand would not have touched Will’s nose. So in a straightforward sense, Will does what he wants to do, and he would not have done it had he not wanted to. There is no obvious breakdown of control so far.

But, you might say, Will acts on a desire he does not (and, because of the severed cc, cannot) be conscious of. But is this really a requirement for free will? That all our acts be based on motives that we are conscious of?

More plausibly, you might question whether the motive that Will acted upon was really his own. If he had no access to it and no way to compare it to and integrate it with his other desires and beliefs etc., then perhaps it was not really his own.

Then you might argue that your acts cannot be free, unless they are based on motives that are really your own.

This seems right, but *this* problem seems to be an artefact of the split-brain cases, not something you can generalize from. Most of us do have the capacity to integrate our desires and beliefs into a relatively coherent system.

Karl Popper, Postscript to the logic of scientific discovery, vol 2: The Open Universe, An Argument for Indeterminism; Addenda, Indeterminism is not Enough: An Afterword.

“Let us take the physical world to be partially but not completely determined. […] But nothing is gained for us if this World 1 is causally closed toward World 2 and World 3. […] All this means that World 3 can act upon the World 2 of our minds. But if so, there is no doubt that, when a mathematician writes down his World 3 results on (physical) paper, his mind–his World 2–acts upon the physical World 1. Thus World 1 is open towards World 2, just as World 2 is open towards World 3. This is of fundamental importance; for it shows that nature, or the universe to which we belong, and which contains as parts the World 1, 2 and 3, is itself open; it contains World 3, and World 3 can be shown to be intrinsically open. One aspect of the openness of World 3 is a consequence of Godel’s theorem that axiomatized arithmetic is not completable. Yet the incompletability and openness of the universe is perhaps best illustrated by a version of the well-known story of the man who draws a map of his room, including in his map the map which he is drawing. His tasks defies completion, for he has to take account, within his map, of his latest entry.”

Some people will of course argue that free will is not an illusion. And even a few will argue that there is no free will, but that there isn’t even an illusion of free will (the so-called illusion of there being an illusion).